Page 6 of Dallas

“Sarah, I… I worried about you every day.”

His eyes are almost glittering as we sit there underneath the green neon sign, shaped like a cactus, obviously. I don’t want to tell him about my life. I just want to sit like this for a while. I just want to hear that he missed me. That he cares about me.

Oh, God, just knowing someone cares is a whole new feeling. It’s like coming home after being away for a lifetime. If this is all I get out of tonight it might almost be enough.

“I didn’t want to go with her,” I say.

He hadn’t found me. It was the one time he didn’t. I was angry at him for a while, but that faded with time. I let him be one of my very few good memories. I have one picture of him, and I keep it framed. It’s moved to about five different homes with me.

He’s with me wherever I go, whether he knows it or not.

“I know. I know. Afterward, I went off the deep end, kind of. But then they… They found my dad.”

I can’t help but wonder what the deep end was, but that thought is completely derailed by the revelation about his dad.

“What?”

He laughs, a short, disbelieving sound. “Of course, you wouldn’t know about that.”

“No. I don’t know anything.”

“It turns out my mom never told my dad about me. She lost custody of me, and they didn’t pursue him until I exhausted all my options. After you were gone I… I kind of lost it. I ran out of options. There were no more places that would take me. Not even group homes. But that’s what led me to my dad.”

“Your biological dad?”

“Yeah. He’s great.”

“Really?”

“He was really young when my mom got pregnant. Then she told him she lost the baby, and left town. By the time I showed up at his place with my garbage bag full of all my shit, he was single and living in a really nice place, so it was…an upgrade. He hooked up with my stepmom not long after that.”

“Huh.”

It’s such a funny thing, and I don’t really know what to say. He has a dad. A respectable dad with a career. I don’t know what I thought. But I guess I just figured that Dallas spent the rest of his childhood in foster care. I knew his mom had lost custody for sure and certain.

Something that never happened to me, to my detriment.

“Yeah. Right when I moved in, he started kind of having a thing with this woman, his business partner. And his best friend. Anyway, she’s my stepmom. Really, she’s the only mom I know – she’s great. I have an amazing family.”

Envy that I don’t see coming stabs me square in the chest. I’m not really sure what the envy is about. Him finding a family, or this family having him for all these years while I just didn’t.

It makes me burn.

Maybe it doesn’t matter exactly what it’s from.

“I’m really happy for you,” I say.

I never imagined him with a home. With a family. When I saw that he was in the rodeo I wrote some ridiculous fairy tale in my head about how he’d gotten there. Taking a job on a ranch with some cowboys after he got spit out of the system and discovering he had a talent for…riding bulls. I don’t know how or why anyone realizes they can do that or decides toseeif they can. But he doesn’t fit my idea of the fantasy I had of him.

He's Dallas, but he’s not.

There’s something more complicated about him, something in the way he holds his shoulders, his jaw.

He orders us some French fries and drinks, and I realize I haven’t eaten all day. My nerves consumed my appetite, and the only thing I gnawed on were my fingernails. I couldn’t do anything but anticipate this moment, and I’m starving now, but I also think if I tried to eat, I’d throw up on his boots.

The trouble is, it’s hard to make small talk with a man who held you while you shook and cried as a traumatized child. A man who both knows me in ways no one else ever has, and also now doesn’t really know me at all. It’s hard to make small talk when there’s so much heaviness hanging in the air, and the truth of why I’m here.

“Why did you come tonight, Sarah?” he asks.

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